The most beautiful girl in the world can only give what she has.

 The Most Beautiful Woman in the World.

In the dim and distant past, when I was just a very small boy, I read Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers. Or, more likely, my mother made the attempt to read it to my brother and I. I have the vaguest memories of any actual reading, although I do remember the actual physical book. It was hardbacked and had a picture of the musketeers on the front. We were more interested in the licence it gave us to idle our days
sword-fencing than in the actual story. But a phrase from the book stuck with me, and in time became something I would quote time and again:

"The most beautiful girl in the world can only give what she has."

It's a proverb, and I quote it often. I have come to quote it too often for comfort, as I try to make sense of my increasing frustration in face of organisations and institutions which, promising help, offer nothing but a hindrance that breeds hopelessness.

The proverb is quoted in chapter 11 of The Three Musketeers, 'In Which the Plot Thickens.' I'll give the full text (it will save me the trouble of always having to look it up to check the context for added meaning).

“His visit to M. de Treville being paid, the pensive d'Artagnan took the longest way homeward.

On what was d'Artagnan thinking, that he strayed thus from his path, gazing at the stars of heaven, and sometimes sighing, sometimes smiling?
He was thinking of Mme. Bonacieux. Foran apprentice Musketeer the young woman was almost an ideal of love.
Pretty, mysterious, initiated in almost all the secrets of the court, which reflected such a charming gravity over her pleasing features, it might be surmised that she was not wholly unmoved; and this is an irresistible charm to novices in love. Moreover, d'Artagnan had delivered her from the hands of the demons who wished to search and ill treat her; and this important service had established between them one of those sentiments of gratitude which so easily assume a more tender character.

D'Artagnan already fancied himself, so rapid is the flight of our dreams upon the wings of imagination, accosted by a messenger from the young woman, who brought him some billet appointing a meeting, a gold chain, or a diamond. We have observed that young cavaliers received presents from their king without shame. Let us add that in these times of lax morality they had no more delicacy with respect to the mistresses; and that the latter almost always left them valuable and durable remembrances, as if they essayed to conquer the fragility of their sentiments by the solidity of their gifts.

Without a blush, men made their way in the world by the means of women blushing. Such as were only beautiful gave their beauty, whence, without doubt, comes the proverb, "The most beautiful girl in the world can only give what she has."
Such as were rich gave in addition a part of their money; and a vast number of heroes of that gallant period may be cited who would neither have won their spurs in the first place, nor their battles afterward, without the purse, more or less furnished, which their mistress fastened to the saddle bow.

D'Artagnan owned nothing. Provincial diffidence, that slight varnish, the ephemeral flower, that down of the peach, had evaporated to the winds through the little orthodox counsels which the three Musketeers gave their friend. D'Artagnan, following the strange custom of the times, considered himself at Paris as on a campaign, neither more nor less than if he had been in Flanders--Spain yonder, woman here. In each there was an enemy to contend with, and contributions to be levied.”

Make of that what you will. We always wanted to be D'Artganan whenever we put the books down and picked the swords up, and fought over the right to be the hero of the hour.
'D'Artagnan owned nothing.' I'm reminded of the worlds which writer Nikos Kazantzakis chose to have engraved on his tombstone: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.”

There is little point hoping for something that doesn't exist, and fearing the worst when the worst is all there is. 'And nothin' ain't worth nothin' but it's free.' Or maybe this is less freedom than starting defeated and reconciled.

Spend much time seeking help and support from organisations and institutions claiming to offer help and support and you soon learn to hope for nothing. Somehow, I approach various bodies, whether on housing or employment or anything, expecting nothing and still come away disappointed. The attitude seems to be that only if you are broken, defeated, destitute, suicidal or a menace to others will 'the system' step in.
If you are none of the above then you are OK and can carry on in your spiral downwards until the day comes when you are finally broken, mentally, physically, fiscally, and socially, only to find that you are now in a place from which there is no return. This seems to be the history of the institutions charged with the care and welfare of those in need, withholding resources when resources could make a positive difference, only to waste them profligately on containment, when no cure is possible.

I had dispiriting exchanges with various employment agencies in the 1980s and 1990s. You soon learn that the help you need is not the help which these institutions offer. And take your leave, if you have sufficient nerve and can withstand the hardship of being alone. I have had to return to seek help in 2020, only to find that nothing had changed. I did well to get so far by my own steam. I did well to keep myself out of the clutches of the institutions. I am the urban fox, with brush intact. How many others can say the same?

I had sharp exchanges with the employment service in 2010. I needed just four hours a week of teaching to finalize the MA Learning and Teaching in Higher Education I was looking to complete. That would have been my way into the academic profession. That ambition was not some flight of fancy on my part, having obtained a first degree in history, gone on to an economics masters, and ending with a PhD in philosophy. None of that made the slightest impression on the employment service. The people who work for the employment service simply look at available jobs and available hands and put them together. They have zero interest in ambitions, skills, interests, the particularly human character of problems and their solutions. Not one single solitary person I dealt with showed the remotest interest in helping me obtain those four teaching hours a week. I learned that this had nothing to do with personal malice. Like beautiful women, institutions are able to offer only what they have and no more. To the employment service, I was simply someone looking for work. The fact that I had very definite views on what that work looked like merely marked me out as 'difficult,' for the reason that my idea of work didn't remotely fit the profile of the typically available jobs at the job centre. So my plans and requests fell on the deafest of deaf ears. Instead – comically or tragically – I ended up in the clutches of A4E and being told to 'clean toilets if need be.'

If the most beautiful woman in the world can offer only what she has, then the institutions charged with conforming people to their lot offer something that is much less than pretty.

I have had the same miserable experiences with other institutions and organisations. You approach these places with a fairly good understanding of the problems you face, and you can have a fairly good idea of the help and resources you need to resolve those problems. Quickly, however, you learn that organisations can offer only what they have, and even then only if they feel that you fit their criteria of being worthy of being helped. I received the most meagre of help from one prominent employment agency, effectively placing me in a job that was hard to fill because nobody else wanted to do it, and was then asked to offer public thanks and praise in a case study in their magazine. At that point I lost my normally good temper and sent a strongly worded statement back – and left the job. The same with respect to various housing organisations. As I faced the prospect of being made homeless I approached one place and was told, despite chronic health conditions and autism, that I was 'low priority.' 'Low priority as in no priority' I responded, to be met with a silence that confirmed that pessimistic assessment. So what on Earth was the point of all the rigmorole I had been involved in? The filling in of forms, the applications, participation in the bidding process for available housing etc? It was futile and this woman knew it and confirmed it with her silence.

I learned the lesson by experience – institutions offer what they can, and have a vested interest in dressing it up as so much more than it is. In one area after another, from employment to housing to education, I found that whenever I needed help and support I was offered nothing. And I learned to call it out as nothing. And every time I do I quote the proverb “the most beautiful girl in the world can offer only what she has.”

I'll end with a note on the personnel in these institutions. I have extensive experience of dealing with the functionaries of the various organisations and bodies composing 'the system.' Those who have done the job for any length of time know the score and live in a world without hopes, ideals, and dreams. They immediately assess the people who contact them in terms of their needs, determining urgency and priority according to clear institutional criteria with respect to elegibility. There are some things they can help with, some problems they can address, with all other things being outside of their remite and hence of no concern.
Functionaries don't waste time and energy. Communication with them can be a profoundly dehumanising experience. You get the feeling that you are dealing with a robot and not a human being. The personal is stripped to the bare minimum, as in non-existent, as attention focuses on what (little) can be done and what (little) is on offer.

It's understandable. The functionaries of the impersonal world are dealing with countless people in need on a daily basis and don't have time and energy to waste on exchanges that are destined to lead nowhere. If an institution lacks the resources to deal with certain problems, those problems cease to exist. If you continue to seek help you will be guided in the direction of 'solutions' that are indeed institutionally available. They may not be solutions to the problems you have, but they are the only solutions these institutions can give.

It all makes for a profoundly dehumanising experience. Social interaction and communication are things which autistic people can find challenging. I psyche myself up, prepare my lines, define the problem and state my needs clearly, in expectation of a warm and pulsating engagement with a fellow human being, only to find myself exchanging words with what seems to be a humanoid delivering the party line in the most impersonal terms. As Max Weber wrote a century ago, the modern bureaucratic age proceeds 'without regard for persons.' It rarely feels that you are exchanging words with persons, more with the inhuman personnel of alien bodies.

There are exceptions. I respond most heartily to those few persons who actually listen to my words and respond positively to the things I say above and beyond the institutional call of duty. Even more remarkably, said persons may even laugh at my comic asides and droll observations on life off the record as we go through the obligatory form filling. A human person! Whenever I encounter the odd one I feel like proposing. It does my heart good to be speaking to a real person who listens and responds to my words, regardless of their relevance to strict institutional criteria. It should go without saying that I am not very good on the odd occasion I get to see my doctors. My doctors are women and, rather than take the opportunity to raise problems and issues, I enjoy a cheery chat and then go home. I'm pretty sure that that's not how these things are supposed to work.

It's all very heartening, but it doesn't contradict the rather pessimistic thesis adumbrated above. On the contrary, it rather confirmed it. Because the wonderfully warm human persons I encounter invariably turn out to be new to the job. They have yet to learn the hard way that the human touch is wasteful of time and energy, is not the most efficient way of connecting addressable problems to available resources, and wears the functionary down in time to such an extent that they become unable to do their jobs. Which leads to the rather miserable conclusion that effectiveness within the institutional order requires a thoroughoing depersonalisation of the warm and caring human persons. In making that point I have this rather sad image of lovely compassionate humans seeking to help people in need having to ration their care and compassion in such a way as to be able to do continue to do their jobs within the most ugly institutions which are able to offer only what they have, which is very little. In time, they lurn to curtail and curb the care and compassion, tempering it down to the minimum that is on offer.

I've said it many times before and I dare say I will say it many more times still – we are seeking external solutions via alien institutions for problems which arise through the lack of social connection and proximity in the inner core of society. We need to resocialize society so that we are governed by bodies – and people – who have the highest regard for persons. Self-governance from below, from within society and from within communities of character and praxtice, is better than top-down bureaucratic governance. That's my long standing political view and my wretched experiences with institutions continues to confirm it.

I have to say that my point of view, earned by a long and frustrating experience, is not a happy one, but if I have not found consolation in accepting the brutal and inevitable truth I have at least grown calmer. Or, if not calm, then resignation in light of constant disappointment. At least I have come to see the hard institutional, fiscal and social reasons for disappointment and no longer raise my expectations 'too high,' as in seeking help and support beyond the bare minimum, as in the non-existent.

I once took part in a programme for graduates and professionals who were members of the long-term unemployed. The point of the programme was to get people of high intelligence and ability to lower their employment sights and accept whatever work was available on whatever terms it was offered. I have maintained contact with three people I met on that programme, all of whom have gone on to obtain very decent jobs. Rather than nurture people's ambitions and abilities, the point of the programme was to destroy hope and confidence, break people's pride down, break their character, and have them accept whatever was on offer. The intentions of those delivering this employment shock-therapy were quite clear and incredibly crude. And stupid. The implication was that once people discarded the barriers to employment that they themselves had erected, they would lower their sights and start to apply for the jobs that were available. It was demonstrable nonsense. The people there were graduates who had, in most cases, worked as professionals. They were already applying to work in call centres. There was an ex-solicitor who was applying to work as a delivery driver, a maths graduate who was applying to work the doors of nightclubs, language graduates who were applying to work in call centres, and so on. People were already lowering their sights and still getting nowhere. They were told to 'dumb down' their CVs to avoid looking over-qualified. I made the point that first people will be told to 'dumb down' their identity, then they will simply just be dumb. But that was the extent and nature of the 'help and support' available within this particular employment programme, which was no help and support at all. The crude and simple aims were thoroughly misguided, based on the mistaken premise that people were unemployed on account of barriers to employment that they were raising, particularly with respect to high expectations. Expectations were already low and people were still not being hired. The result of the approach, predictably, was demoralisation and disorientation. One guy, an IT expert, was clearly suffering from depression, was relentlessly negative in his speech and manner, and, in the words of one of the women running the programme, was 'beaten.' And that's my point. There are people out there who are being run into the ground and destroyed for want of just a modicum of the right help and support. Inappropriate and ineffecitve 'help and support,' offered on the most inhuman and impersonal terms, merely makes a bad situation a whole lot worse, adding to the weight of the world rather than lifting it.

Having been on the receiving end of such treatment consistently and systematically over the years, I have been both upset and angry. This was my experience from the very first. I learned then that you are better off going your own way and seeking to help yourself, taking your chances. It will work for most people. The bizarre thing is that those for whom it doesn't work, those in need of help and support, are effectively given the same message of 'help yourself,' only by institutional means. If they could do that, they wouldn't need institutional intervention ..

I am angry at the illogic and inhumanity of it all, the sheer time-wasting and energy-sapping stupidity of it all. I stopped being angry when I came to understand that the people dispensing such 'help and support' really do proceed without regard for persons, are functionaries executing tasks rather than persons, and really don't care one way or the other. I once had a long and heated exchange with a woman who worked at the employment service. She refused point blank to see my predicament and the sheer stupidity of the employment programme she was intent on putting me on – that was the only 'help' available and it was her job to offer it/impose it. It was that or nothing. 'You can't win' she told me. And she could do no other. One of the women running the programme told me that she would take another job at the drop of a hat, if she could. She knew the job was worse than useless.

Youcan't stay angry and upset forever. Or, if you do, you have to channel your energies in the right direction. You can't upset a swamp and you would be a fool to try. The people inside the swamp don't care and are used to ignoring angry words and pleas for justice as irrelevant.

Listening to my seemingly endless protest at almost everything, my uncle taught me the Serenity Prayer, the first part.

People tend to leave the God-bit in the second section out:

The Serenity Prayer

God grant me the serenity

To accept the things I cannot change;

Courage to change the things I can;

And wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time;

Enjoying one moment at a time;

Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;

Taking, as He did, this sinful world

As it is, not as I would have it;

Trusting that He will make all things right

If I surrender to His Will;

So that I may be reasonably happy in this life

And supremely happy with Him Forever and ever in the next.

Amen.

(prayer attributed to Reinhold Neibuhr, 1892-1971)

I prefer the first part to the second, because the second would seem to involve an inordinate amount of acceptance of the inevitability of things that the wise would see as most definitely challengeable and changeable. But point taken – if you are intent on changing the things that can be changed, then select your targets well and use your time and energy productively.

Which comes back to the proverb: 'the most beautiful girl in the world can give only what she has.' With everything you seek to access, determine what it has to offer and what it hasn't, determine what it can do and what it can't. And I refer to things specifically rather than persons. It is pointless seeing functionaries as persons, when really they are mere place-sitters executing and implementing institutional priorities. The whole thing does indeed proceed without regard to persons, for the reason that it is inherently impersonal.

Seek personal relation this way and you will recoil in horror at the inhumanism. I have stopped being upset and angry with institutions and organisations because they do not give what they are unable to give. I am trying to do the same with respect to people and life in general, albeit unsuccessfully. I have the notion that if I have an innate, instinctive feeling that people and life can do better and have more to give than they seem to offer, that is because they do indeed have more. I take my inner feeling and gut instinct as evidence of the life insurgent, of a vitality that I have and which i quite naturally part of life's generalised potential. Nature, I take it, is not so miserly as all-too-human institutions conformed to particular and transient time and place. At every point where social institutions set the meannest parameters of possibility, nature pursues and attains the impossible, pressing on to and beyond the frontiers of dream, desire, and development in an unbridled creative surge. It's just not a view I would present to a functionary serving their time in the institutional sphere. The ones who will get it are the ones who are new to the job, the ones being initiated and conformed, the ones still retaining the human factor, the personal touch, an unimpaired natural sociability. They will lose that the longer they do the job. They will have to if they are not to burn out under the weight of so many people in so much social need. Institutions are being charged with solving an inner disconnection by external means – it can't be done, and it is unwise to expect the functionaries of the system to do it.

The source of anger and upset is the failure to see the difference between the inner world and the outer. You are upset and angry with people for what they have failed to do precisely because you think them capable of doing much more than, institutionally, they can. I have stopped being upset and angry because I no longer expect from functionaries people anything more than what the institutions they work for can give.

That what these institutions offer in terms of help and support is nevertheless a genuine cause for upset and anger, rather than resignation
and passivity. 'Society' as a whole needs to do better than this, and much better. There are resources available, there is money being spent – and misallocated and wasted.

When it comes to seeking help and support it is wise in the first instance to properly identify your needs and then seek out possible sources of redress. When approaching and dealing with institutions and organisations, seek to determine from the very start what they have to offer and whether it fits your needs. Always but always you will find that those you are dealing with are proceeding 'without regard for persons,' in the sense that they are quickly assessing your needs against their resources in order to make the best fit possible.
Often, there is no fit at all. It is at this point you have to decide whether the 'best fit' is likely to be of any help to you. You may well consider it more of a hindrance, in which case you may be best accepting that there is no help and support available and just resigning yourself to the fact that you are on your own. It's a hard truth to swallow, but there's no point in making a hard situation even harder by trying to make an unworkable 'best fit' work. There is no reason to expect of institutions, still less demand, anything other than that which they can give, and they can give only that which they do give. To ask for more is a mistake that wastes your time and energy.

Why do we expect personal interest, concern, and reciprocity from every one we encounter? Probably because we approach the external world of institutions from within our own inner, and still human, world. We thus retain a tendency to idealize the external world in terms of a natural sociability, only to be horrified by the impersonality of it all.

Of course, the truth is rather simple.

The people who work for institutions and organisations do so in their public capacity. This is their job, where they earn their money. They are not paid to socialise with 'clients,' but to assess need and eligibility to see if they have help to offer, and then set about offering it. The people doing their jobs within these institutions and organisations have private lives away from their working lives, and it is there, in private, where they deliver the personal touch in relation to significant others. In other words, it's people on the margins of society who tend to approach organisational engagement as some form of social life. And end up predictably disappointed, with rare exceptions. I guess there are a lot of lonely people in the world.

The images are of Francoise Hardy, who has served well as my imaginary girl over the years. They are personal photos, the eyes coming from an Italian magazine I own, and the image in red an LP that has the subtitle 'the essential and the existential,' which sums up my worldview. I once wrote to Francoise, and in French if you please. She never wrote back and I never wrote again. As the Danny Wilson song Imaginary Girl would have it:

I was only sixteen when I saw St. Stephen

Standing on the corner of the street of dreams
When I needed someone badly to believe in
Stephen had the answer to my prayers, or so it seems
He said, "An imaginary girl is so exciting
Marry an imaginary girl and you need nothing in writing"

"She won't upset you
She'll never forget you
Hang on to your dreams
I'll get you one imaginary girl"


It beats trying to make appointments with doctors and nurses, I suppose.